Configure Windows Indexing Service for Performance

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Configure Windows Indexing Service for Performance

By Stephen Bucaro

The Windows Indexing Service provides you with the ability
to perform advanced searches on directories located on your
computer and on shared directories on the network. The
Indexing Service was introduced with IIS (Internet
Information Services) and is now installed with Windows
2000 and Windows XP.

The Indexing Service is not started by default on a Windows
2000 professional computer. If you want the Indexing
service to start automatically, select "Start | Settings |
Control Panel | Administrative Tools" and open the
"Computer Management" application. In the left pane of the
"Computer Management" window, select "Services", then in
the right pane, right-click on "Indexing Service". The
"Indexing Services Properties" dialog box will appear.

In the "Indexing Services Properties" dialog box, on the
"General" tab select "Automatic" from the "Startup type:"
drop-down list. Under "Service stautus:" click on the
"Start" button. A flurry of hard disk activity may begin
as the Indexing Service builds or updates the index. The
Indexing service creates an index (also called a catalog)
organized in a way that makes it quick and easy to search.
The Indexing Service also records the documents properties,
for example its date of creation and last modified date.

The Search application can be accessed by right-clicking
on any folder and selecting "Search..." in the popup menu.
You can search for file names or you can search for text
within files using keywords, or phases. Queries can use
wildcards (?, *) and boolean operators (AND OR and NOT).
When a user searches an NTFS volume, the Indexing service
will return in the results only the files the user has
permission to see.

The documents created by most applications contain
formatting and control information, for example a webpage
contains html tags, a Word document contains rtf tags. The
Indexing Service uses filters to extract the content from
the formatting and control information. Documents with
extensions for which filters are not installed will not be
indexed by default. If you want to index everything, open
the "Computer Management" application as described above,
and select "Services ...", then right-click on "Indexing
Service" and select "Properties" in the popup menu. In the
"Indexing Services Properties" dialog box which appears,
on the "Generation" tab, check the checkbox next to "Index
Files With Unknown Extensions".

The Indexing service is designed to run continuously and
requires no maintenance. After it is setup, it will
automatically update the index. When a file changes, the
OS sends a change notification to the Indexing Service,
causing it to update the index. Folders on remote computers
are scanned periodically.

The Windows Indexing Service uses a fair amount of disk
space (approximately 30% the amount of the original files).
If the shared directories on the network are large, it can
consume a considerable portion of the computer's memory and
processor cycles. There are several options for configuring
the Indexing Service to improve performance.

To configure the Indexing Service select "Start | Settings
| Control Panel | Administrative Tools" and open the
"Computer Management" application. In the left pane of the
"Computer Management" window, click the plus sign next to
"Services and Applications", then right-click on the
"Indexing Service" icon. In the popup menu, select
"All Tasks | Tune Performance". The "Indexing Service Usage"
dialog box will appear.

The "Indexing Service Usage" dialog box provides three
radio button options that let Windows set the Indexing
Service Performance for you; "Used often",
"Used occasionally", and "Never Used". If you want to
provide your own custom setting, set the "Customize"
radio button and click on the "Customize..." button. The
"Desired Performance" dialog box will appear.

The "Desired Performance" dialog box contains two slider
controls. The "Indexing" slider control sets how quickly
the catalog will be updated. Adjust it to the left to
reduce the amount of system resources used to update the
catalog. The "Querying" slider control sets how quickly
search results will be returned. Adjusting it to the left
will reduce the amount of system resources used, but search
results will take longer to return.

You can also control the Indexing Service by configuring
the specific folders to be indexed. When you click on the
"Indexing Service" icon in the "Computer Management" window,
the right pane should list a catalog named "System". When
you double-click on a catalog, you will find three folders,
"Directories", "Properties", and "Query The Catalog".

Note: If Internet Information Server (IIS) is installed on
your computer, you should also see a catalog named "Web".
The Web catalog scans the C:Inetpub directory.

To add a folder to be indexed, right-click on the
"Directories" folder and select "New | Directory" in the
popup menu. In the "Add Directory" dialog box that appears,
enter the path of the new directory. To remove a folder,
left-click on the "Directories" folder to display the list
of directories in the right pane. Then left-click on a
directory and select "Delete" in the popup menu.

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